I am a retired financial journalist. I worked for the Reuters news wire from 1968 through 1987. I started out covering the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the heyday of pork belly, live cattle and shell egg futures. Big money changed hands on those futures markets and readers made and lost money often based on things they read on the news wires. They really held our feet to the fire when we reported on market developments. I was proud to function as a part of the free market system. That’s why the mainstream media’s nearly complete divorce from the facts these days is so painful to me. I rarely even see an attempt to report facts in the media these days. It is a 24/7/365 non-stop game of how much mud can we sling at the President. They aren’t practicing journalism. It is just polemic and second rate at that.

This study by Daniel Greenfield does a great job explaining the nature of much of what we see on TV and read in the newspapers and magazines.

Turn on CNN at any hour of the day and there will be frowning talking heads reading teleprompter conspiracy theories about President Trump.

Where do all these theories even come from?

Some of them are generated by the small number of media outlets, CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times, that still have enough staff on their payrolls to carry on their mockery of journalism.

But mostly they come from Twitter.

If you’ve seen one self-righteous tantrum about the sacred fire of journalism, you’ve seen them all. The dirty truth is that the media mostly just puts a professional gloss on trending Twitter topics. That’s why CNN did a story about a dog whose ear, according to the nation’s top news network, looks like Trump’s face. (Yes, this really happened.) It’s also where a lot of the media’s political stories come from.